They move forward, each one, in slow motion; make their solemn observance; then turn inward and away.
What this linked movement suggests is a slow dance to unheard music. It is the movement of the four figures in Pontormo’s Visitation at Carmignano: the Virgin and Saint Elizabeth (facing one another and encircled in one another’s arms like a couple dancing, one old, one young but wearing the same face), and their doubles who stand behind them, in full face and staring out at us. But instead of hovering, as Pontormo’s figures do, slightly above the ground in an implied dance, Bill Viola has created for his figures a slowed-down dreamlike action that unfolds within the frame he has set up for us; like a lighted window space that we watch them move into then out again.
The effect, both in Pontormo’s painting and in Viola’s video, is deeply moving and deeply mysterious in the way that dreams are. We look on as we do in dreams, with no need for explanation and no question that seeks an answer. If we feel the absence of something here it is not words – dialogue or commentary would be superfluous, would break the spell. What we might miss is that unheard music. But we don’t wish for that either. The grave rhythm as it unfolds, the slow dance, suggests all we need of music.
I had seen this video on several occasions before I tried to set down the effect it creates, and each time I found my mind’s eye going back to those paintings of Pontormo. Only recently did I discover that in 1995, for the five-hundredth anniversary of Pontormo’s birth, Bill Viola had produced for the Venice Biennale a large-scale video, The Greeting, that makes specific reference to Pontormo’s Visitation, a tribute across the centuries from one artist to a still-living predecessor. But the two women in The Greeting bear little resemblance to Pontormo’s figures, and The Greeting does have dialogue, though it is reduced to a whisper.
Observance makes no direct reference to Pontormo, but in mood, in its colour and light, its movement, in the expression its figures wear, is closer to him than The Greeting; in the way, too, that silence is used and the figures, released here from stillness, act out in real space a choreography the painter can only suggest. The camera angle reproduces Pontormo’s low viewpoint; the single camera set-up, and the long continuous take, rather than dissolving the frame as when we give ourselves to a movie, draws our attention to it.
Observance is less like a moving picture than a picture that moves. In its slow dance – or so it seems to me – all the questions raised by picture making in its relation to time, narrative and the greater flexibility of language, disappear. This is stillness in motion, a present that unfolds but involves no before or after. It might, like music, to take up Pater’s formulation, be a supreme example of the condition to which all art aspires.
Look, NSW Gallery magazine, 2007
PASSING SHOW
JOHN KEATS, IN ONE of his last and greatest poems, addresses the Grecian urn that is his model of transcendent art:
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought,
As dost eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain …
The special quality he is isolating in the work of art is its permanence against the passing seasons and the actions and generations of men, and this insistence on ‘endurance’ goes back to the beginnings of aesthetic thinking. Shakespeare, in claiming for what is merely written the permanency of metal or stone,
Not marble, nor the gilden monuments
of princes shall outlast my powerful rhyme
is already echoing a poet of 1500 years before, the Horace of Ode XXX, Book III:
Exigi monumentum aere perennius
regalique situ pyramidium altius
(I have made a monument more enduring than bronze and taller than a pyramid)
The claim, itself an enduring one, is that the work of art, the object carved in marble, struck in bronze, raised in stone, or painted or in mosaic on a wall, belongs not to time and ‘occasion’ but to what Yeats, in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, called ‘the artifice of eternity’.
Of course there has from the beginning been another form of artistic action that makes no such claim. Opposed to objects that exist solidly in space, in an eternal presence that resists time, are works of performance that belong only in time, and to a single, if endlessly repeatable, occasion; dependent, as they are, on the immediate energy and interaction of the actors, singers, dancers, musicians who produce them, but also on the chemistry of each particular audience, and on the spatial or other qualities, indoors or out, of the venue. No performance is fixed or perfect – that is a good part of its attraction – or free of contingency or risk; and since it cannot, like the object in space, be returned to, it endures (that is its special poignancy) only as a trace in the memory, or memoirs, of those who were there to experience it.
Later, in the nineteenth century, such traces of performance were also searched out in some works of the other kind; as brushstrokes for example, signs of action and presence, in Venetian painters, and in Velasquez and Rubens, and later again in the plein air works of the Impressionists. But essentially the distinction between works either made or performed was till the early twentieth century an orthodoxy. Made works were always the real thing, and clearly superior.
In fact painters, sculptors and architects often worked in genres that were ‘occasional’ and ephemeral: mediaeval floats and processions that celebrated civic or religious festivals; the triumphal arches and tableaux that welcomed Renaissance princes; later, stage designs, such as the ones that Inigo Jones created for court masques and ballets, and the transformation scenes of Baroque opera.
Bernini, in 1638, was the producer of an extraordinary spectacle, The Flooding of the Tiber, that ended with the backdrop being raised to reveal a second audience, two ‘theatres’ facing one another as in a mirror; and Jacques-Louis David, at the height of the Terror, organised vast outdoor celebrations of the Days of the Revolutionary Calendar. But artists continued to make a distinction between occasional art and art that was intended to endure.
Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel, theatrical as it may be, and dependent for its effect on the moment and on illusion, takes place in a theatre of eternity – that is its whole point. Several generations of the Cornaro family, who as spectators of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa occupy boxes on either side of the altar, are frozen in a single moment, and are of marble. They are always available to view, as is the spectacle of the saint itself, (which is ‘fixed’) as Saint Teresa and the angel float in an eternal moment before them. Even Pozzo’s vast ceiling in St Ignazio, which is occasional in that it springs fully into existence only when a single spectator moves to a particular spot on the church floor, can be returned to and is designed to endure.
The challenge to this orthodoxy, and the hierarchy on which it was based, comes only with the Dadaist performances at Cabaret Voltaire, and later at the Odeon, in 1916, first in Zurich, later in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere; and in the 1930s in the vast spectacles arranged for the Nazis by Albert Speer, culminating in the Nuremburg Rally in 1934 and preserved on film by Leni Riefenstahl; then in the many installations and happenings of the 1960s, and increasingly in works such as Christo’s wrapping of sites and public buildings, the gallery performances of Gilbert & George, and locally of Mike Parr and Ken Unsworth, and in Deborah Warner’s The Angel Project at the 2000 Perth Festival.
A large part of what now constitutes contemporary art runs counter to previous orthodoxies. In line with an outlook and sensibility that sees in immediacy and presence something more essential to art than what is fixed and permanent – ‘the imperfect’, to quote Wallace Stevens, ‘is so hot within us’ – contemporary artists have embraced contingency, performance, play, but also wit, humour, anguish, provocation, affront, and the pathos of transience and error, as being more properly truthful to the world as it is than older verities. They invite us in – as they do to the thirteen rooms that make up the latest and most ambitious of the John Kaldor Public Art Projects.
To occupy the spaces they create and become the players and spectators, and sometimes both, who will amplify with our presence the occasions they offer, and make a living theatre of them.
Catalogue essay for the John Kaldor Public Art Project 13 Rooms, 2013
II
TWO LIBRETTI: VOSS AND MER DE GLACE
INTRODUCTION
IN APRIL 1978, SHORTLY after I moved to Italy, I had a call from Peter Hemmings, the general manager at that time of the Australian Opera. He was in Florence and suggested we meet the following Monday for a late breakfast.
I had known Peter for three years. Our friendship grew out of the reviews I had written for the National Times and we came together usually to mull over the Opera’s problems, he as administrator, passionately engaged with the company’s musical and production standards, I as enthusiastic amateur. We met, had our breakfast, took a bus to Fiesole, and set out on an easy walk around its hills.
Peter had given me no hint that we had anything particular to discuss, so I was surprised when he asked if I had ever thought of writing a libretto. In raking through old correspondence at the Opera he had discovered a commission that had gone out, some years before, to Richard Meale, for a new opera. He had written to Richard, convinced him that he was now ready, and had suggested as a subject Patrick White’s Voss. Somehow, in the discussions that followed, my name had come up as a possible librettist.
I knew Meale’s music, though we had never met, and the prospect of working with the composer of Clouds Now and Then, Incredible Floridas and Very High Kings was an enticing one. But I also knew something of the process by which operas get on to the stage, and how many of them end up in the composer’s bottom drawer, never to be performed.
Then there was the scale of the undertaking. Three or four years earlier I had tried my hand at providing words for music in a libretto for a friend, Diana Blom, but that had been a chamber work. Voss was an epic. Reducing its 450 pages to the 2000 words that might be needed for a three-act music drama would be like reducing a fruit cake to a wafer.
Then there was Patrick, who was, as I knew, particularly sensitive on the subject of Voss. I was used to warning friends who were about to meet him for the first time that ‘Voss’ was the one four-letter word that could not be uttered in his presence. It was the only one of his books that strangers ever mentioned (or as he put it, ‘gushed over’), and most of them, he knew, had never read it.
Then there was the film. After the bitter disappointments that attended on its demise, Patrick had convinced himself that any project that had to do with Voss was doomed from the start. The book had a curse on it. Leichhardt had never wanted it to be written.
But by the end of our walk, I had agreed, on Peter’s urging, to go back to my village and take another look at the book. What had finally convinced me that this project might make it all the way to the stage was that Peter had already, before a word of the libretto or a note of the music had been written, engaged Jim Sharman as its director. I went back to Campagnatico, re-read and marked up the novel, and wrote off to Richard Meale.
What I had to ask him was a series of technical questions about the kind of music he meant to write. Did he want fixed arias or should the whole libretto be laid out as continuous speech? What forces did he have in mind? How free could I be in inventing scenes and incidents that would determine the number of voices involved and their combination – as duets, trios, ensembles etc? Rather surprisingly, I thought, Richard replied that he was ready to leave all this – what I would have regarded as the musical texture of the piece – to me, and to see, when I was done, what he could make of it.
Meanwhile, in looking again at the book – not as an absorbing experience for an alert and solitary reader but as material for the two-hour traffic of the stage – I saw why the various film script writers had had so much difficulty with it. How, in a work whose narrative is so inward, and the most dramatic revelations and reverses occur as moments of non-verbal communication, to establish a clear dynamic and an architecture that would allow for the usual scenes and acts.
The two central characters, Voss and Laura Trevelyan, after a couple of brief encounters in Sydney, communicate for the remainder of the book only at a distance; either in one-sided correspondence or in out-of-the-body experiences for which the reader’s mind provides a perfectly appropriate space but which break all the conventions of a performative medium, where presence is everything. But I also saw, with some excitement, that what might be a difficulty in a film or play might be just what opera could best make use of. That these out-of-the-body meetings might work quite naturally in the medium of music, where the particularities of time and space are already dissolved. Which did not mean, of course, that the work would not present other difficulties.
The first was to find a language for the piece that would be as rich and sensuous as White’s – as full of surprising transitions and vivid pictures – but would also, in terms of vowels and consonants, be ‘singable’, and from the listener’s point of view comprehensible. Within these demands I would need to transpose images and phrases from one place in the book to another, to take an image – as in the case of Harry Robarts’ aria – and develop it in my own way, or in Voss’ monologue in the ‘Delirium’ scene to abandon the novel altogether and write my own version of what he might at this point express.
By Christmas I had a provisional first act, and back in Sydney Richard and I discussed and adjusted it. Richard began on the score, played me what he had written, and I felt comfortable enough that I had found a style he could work with to go on quickly with the rest. Essentially my part in the project was over by the middle of the next year.
Voss had its premiere at the Adelaide Festival in March 1986, in a production directed by Jim Sharman, with sets by Brian Thomson, and costumes by Luciana Arrighi. Geoffrey Chard sang Voss, Marilyn Richardson Laura, and Stuart Challender was the conductor.
After the relative success, for a local work, of Voss (nineteen performances in three capital cities), the Australian Opera, now under the direction of Richard Bonynge but with Moffatt Oxenbould in effective control, was prepared, with the generous support of James Fairfax, to commission a second work from Richard Meale. Richard’s suggestion, when he wrote and asked if I might be interested, was Dracula. I replied with a suggestion of my own.
If he wanted to write an opera in that area, why not Frankenstein? The story as Mary Shelley wrote it, but within the context of its first telling at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva in the spring of 1816, with Shelley, Byron and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, to act it out as a play within a play under Mary’s direction. Richard asked me to show him how this might be done and I produced Mer de Glace.
The opera was first performed in October 1991 at the Sydney Opera House, with David Collins-White as Shelley, Lyndon Terracini as Byron, Elizabeth Kerry Brown as Mary Shelley and Linda Thompson as Claire Clairmont. Simon Phillips was the director, Shaun Gurton designed the sets, Angus Strathie the costumes and the conductor was Dobbs Franks.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, then aged nineteen, their small son William, and Claire, aged eighteen, had made their way to Lake Geneva and had been waiting there for Byron and his friend Polidori to take up residence at a neighbouring villa. Shelley and Byron had not yet met, but two months earlier, like a good many of Byron’s female admirers, Claire had sought the poet out at a London theatre and by the time they were reunited, at the end of May, was already pregnant with his child.
So, as it happened, was Byron’s half-sister, Augusta, back in England, which had led to his being driven out of the kingdom.
Polidori, meanwhile, who was Byron’s personal physician, but had aspirations to being a writer himself, was in the pay it seems of the London publisher Murray, to spy on the now infamous exile and keep a diary. His contribution to their storytelling nights at the villa would later be published as The Vampyre.
An extraordinary moment, this, in the lives of
some of the period’s literary giants, and the birth of two enduring Romantic fictions.
The text of Mer de Glace draws on quotations from the diaries and correspondence of the major participants, the hotel register at Mont Blanc, three of Shelley’s lyrics, two of Byron’s, passages from Shelley’s longer poem ‘Mont Blanc’, and for the play within a play key scenes from Frankenstein; but the central character of this retelling of the story is Claire Clairmont.
She is the victim, in one way or another, of all the others, and, as Elizabeth in the Frankenstein story, of the Monster; but Shelley remained her protector for as long as he was alive, and she managed, in her own way, to outlive them all. She died in Florence in 1879, more than sixty years after the events that make up the action of Mer de Glace. Henry James met her in Florence shortly before her death. It was her possession of a bundle of Shelley’s letters, and her refusal to pass them on, that provided him with the subject for one of his finest stories, The Aspen Papers.
VOSS
CHARACTERS
OPERA IN TWO ACTS with Epilogue after the novel by Patrick White
JOHANN ULRICH VOSS
Baritone